


A Trick of the Light

by Catchclaw



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dreams, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, First Time, Force virgins figuring it out on the fly, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 16:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13439145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Once she dreamed of the island in this way, the ocean, and Ben is farther from now her than Anch-To ever was. Perhaps there is a certain logic in looking for him here, in the secret space that is sleep.





	A Trick of the Light

Three months after Crait, asleep in her bed aboard the _Falcon_ , she has the loveliest dream.

She opens her eyes in an unfamiliar darkness. There’s a red tinge to the air, a slight metallic hum, and she’s in a bed that isn’t hers, curled against a body she knows without knowing is his.

Oh.

His skin is warm and soft with sleep and though she’s in the old tunic and leggings she fell asleep in, he’s wearing nothing at all. She flushes at the feel of him, the long stretch of flesh, but because she’s dreaming, she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she grounds herself in the arm she has flung over his hip, in the cheek she has pressed to the back of his neck. These aren’t conscious choices. There won’t be any consequences for imagining that she's close to him like this. It’s only a dream.

For his part, Ben seems wholly unaware of her presence. He doesn’t stir, not even a twitch; keeps on snoring a little, in fact, his head thrown back, his hair an unruly cloud across the same pillow she rests on.

The most dangerous man in the galaxy. The head of the First Order. The son of two generals, the nephew of a Jedi. Asleep like an untroubled child.

It’s absurd.

But who, she tells herself, ever said the sleeping mind was a logical place? It’s ruled by something more powerful than that, more primal. What one wants in the day that lies beyond reason can be had only at night, only when the shades are drawn against what is and opened instead to what could be, if the universe were different.

Once she dreamed of the island in this way, the ocean, and Ben is farther from her now than Anch-To ever was. Perhaps there is a certain logic in looking for him here in the secret space that is sleep.

She lets her fingers graze the curve of his stomach and her nose brush the top of his spine. His skin smells of sweat and a soap that reminds her of the crushed jodqua petals Leia favors in tea: a bitter burn across the tongue that turns inexorably sweet. He doesn’t taste of jodqua, though, and it’s only as her lips leave his neck that she realizes he’s awake.

He doesn’t speak. Instead, he winds his hand in hers and flattens her palm into the valley that runs below his ribs. He is a thousand tiny tremors there, a wave of rivulets strung together tight, and she knows without knowing that he wants her hand elsewhere, but he won’t allow himself to ask. He wants her to take.

Her whole body is humming, lit up and out from within, and she raises her head, emboldened, lays her next kiss on the turn of his jaw. “I’ve come all this way,” she says, the person she can be here in the safety of night, “and you won’t even look at me?”

The noise he makes is half-strangled, half heat. “You’re not real.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No. You’re a shadow or something. A wish.”

“So what’s the harm in looking at shadows?”

He turns his head just a touch, just enough so that his mouth is a whisper from hers. “Simple,” he says. “If I look at you, you’ll disappear.”

In real life, she wouldn’t know how to kiss him. She’s never kissed anyone--not properly. But this is pretend, a gossamer game she’ll forget when her eyes open in the morning so here, here, in his bed, in her head, she can.

She lowers her lips to his slowly, slow, making those millimeters last. He doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, but the hand over hers goes tighter, tight, and when slays her mouth ruddy over his, there’s a punch of shocked sound from his throat:

“Rey,” he says. It’s a question, a plea, and she answers with her tongue, the tips of her teeth, a smile that bleeds into his.

“Rey,” he says again, “ _Rey,"_ and then she’s knocked on her back, spilled across the hot silk of his bed with him looming lovely above her, his mouth on hers again, fervent. She winds an arm around his neck and turns the other around his back and sweet Maker, she wants to touch all of him, to drag her palms over every curve, to sketch the lines of every muscle and bone with the tips of her fingers. She wants--

She arches up and he catches her, his fingers spread wide above the curve of her hip. There’s a swell of sound in her, a song, and it leaks from the seams of their kisses, makes him hum counterpoint in return. Between them, she can feel how hard he is already, how big. And she asks without asking: spreads her thighs and raises her knees and gets him as close as he can be without unlacing her leggings and pushing in. It’s an instinct, one almost as old as the stars, and though it’s the first time she’s felt it, it’s as familiar as the sound of her own heart.

His hips kick and he curses; buries his face in her neck and does it again, his hands going fist on either side of her head. “Don’t,” he says.

She raises herself to meet him, rubs herself against his thrust. “Don’t what?”

“You’ll make me come, if you keep”--they meet again and he groans, a sound that shakes the bed--“yes, like that, that’s--”

He stops. Holds her still, his hand hard around her waist, pinning her hips to the bed, and lifts his head, looks down at her, his cheeks flushed and his eyes impossibly bright. “I want to see you,” he says. “Can I do that?”

She finds his shoulders, squeezes. “Yes. I’d like that.”

He balances his weight on one hand and chases the other under her tunic, shoves it up to bare first the ridge of her ribs, then the peaked swell of her breasts. His face is shattered glass caught just right by the light. “Look at you,” he says. He strokes one of her nipples, pulls it gently flush. “You’re so beautiful.” He tugs at her again and what leaves her body, her mouth, is a noise she’s never made before, one that pools on her tongue and sends tremors to her clit.

He beams at her, unabashed joy. “Oh,” he says, “I need to hear that again.”

He leans down and licks around the tips of his fingers and she’s not sure which makes her ache more: the feel of his tongue or the unwavering adoration in his eyes.

“You taste so good,” he sighs. “Like salt somewhere and sweet.”

Her hands are ardent birds, diving fitful into his hair, lifting, clawing, as he sucks first at one breast, then the other, and he’s moving against her again, his hips in an uneasy cadence, his cock twitching against her thigh, and because it is a dream, because he is smoke and she shadow, she can let go of everything except him and say: “Please.”

He growls, a low rumble from his very core. “Please what?” he says, the words nearly swallowed by her flesh. “I don’t know what to do. Tell me.”

“Ben,” she says, quiet. Quiet quiet, for there’s only he left to hear. “Touch me.”

The air shifts, he twists, and then he’s curled against her, his arm swept beneath the pillow, his face hot beside hers. She finds his mouth and his free hand and guides him, drifts their hands determined towards the laces of her leggings. She gives him no room for quarter or question; so much bolder, she knows, than she would be in life, if she were truly here and if he were truly untying her, undoing her, knot by ragged knot.

“Like this?” he says. His lips are trembling, his whole beautiful body beside hers alight. “You have to--you have to tell me if what I’m doing is right.”

She squeezes his wrist. Lets him go. “It’s right. And I will, I promise.”

He hums something tuneless and walks his fingers into the opening he’s made, slides them down past the laces and pets the edge of her damp curls, smooths them with a sweep of his thumb. She digs her nails into his neck and lifts her hips and he smiles, a broad, searing grin that only widens when they kiss.

“Please,” she whispers. “Please.”

His cock shudders and the sound he makes is base and it’s still in the air when he cups her, when he curls the whole of his hand over her cunt and leaves it there, his fingers swallowing her heat.

Her eyes fly open wide and she cries out, works herself against his palm. “ _Ben_.”

“Hmmm?” he says, easing his lips over hers, spreading his fingers and teasing her labia. “You’re so wet. I can hardly keep a hold of you.” He feeds her the tip of his finger and they both gasp, a sound that sucks the last semblance of sense from her head, from this dream.

“Yes,” she says. “Like that. More.”

“More?” he echoes, but his wrist is already twisting, and in a moment, she has all of him. She raises her knee and presses her thighs together, holds him there, revels in the choked, hot noises he spills over her cheek, then buries between her breasts. She shoves her fingers beneath his wrist and finds her clit and together, they find the right rhythm and her body becomes a storm, a swirl of sensations that are something more than she alone, or he. Something that they can only be when they are one and the same.

“I’m going to come,” she hears herself cry. “You’re going to make me come, Ben, I’m going to--”

He raises his head and for a moment, his dark eyes sink to her soul. “ _Please_.”

She fractures like a living star and for a long, exquisite moment, she is lost, drowning steadily forever in pleasure, in the beat of his heart, in the scraps of affection that rain from his mouth: _sweetheart_ and  _sweetheart_ and _Rey. Oh Rey_.

In the dream, this one, there is the sound of planets dying, of new systems being reborn, and when she can see him again, knows his skin, he’s panting against her mouth and she’s touching him, her fingers in the gaps between his own as they fly over his cock, fly, and when he comes, his back bows like an arbor and he is exquisite, like a sunset on the high desert, and she thinks if she looks too long at him she’ll sink forever in his sands.

“I love you,” he says.

“Yes,” she whispers, “you do.”

He wraps her in his long, shaking arms and sucks another kiss into her neck even as his lips still whisper sweet, and as she closes her eyes with him she can feel wakefulness coming, the edges of the dream fraying, his body slipping through her fingers like starlight.

His hand curled over her heart and the sound of her own voice:

“I love you,” she says.

“Yes,” he says in the last moment of sleep, “I know you do.”

 

*****

  
Later, staring at herself in the crude mirror that hangs beside her bed, she’s not as unnerved as she should be when she sees the crest of Ben’s mouth on her throat, the lilac bruises his kisses have left behind.

So, she thinks, tracing the color with her fingers. So. Not a dream.

She wonders if he knows that, too, if she left some sign of the night behind. Or if he thinks she was just a shadow he looked at too closely; merely a trick of the light.

No, she hears him say without saying. It was you.

**Author's Note:**

> I keep trying to write plot for these two but all that comes out is schmoopy porn. Alas.
> 
> Come say hi on the [tumblr machine](http://catchclaw.tumblr.com).


End file.
